In a typical shopping experience, the shopper walks into a merchant's store, decides which department or area of the store he wants to (begin to) shop in and proceeds to that department or area. Once in the desired department or area, the shopper wanders down various aisles or saunters past various display cases, glancing at the merchant's wares to narrow down the search area for the desired product.
Once in the correct department or area and in the correct sub-department or sub-area, the shopper picks up first one example and then another of the desired product, attempting to locate the one that best fits his criteria. Where the desired product is a camera, for example, these criteria can include brand, features, weight, cost, appearance, etc.
Of course, a salesperson may offer his services to the shopper, particularly with respect to criteria which are not readily obvious on initial inspection.
After selecting the exact example of the desired product that he wishes to buy, the shopper so informs the salesperson or a stock agent (where the stock is not immediately accessible to the shopper). The salesperson or stock agent retrieves an example for the shopper to purchase and to carry home or have delivered.
The shopper's satisfaction with such a shopping experience depends on a number of factors: the ease of finding the correct department or area, the ease of finding the correct sub-department or sub-area, the breadth and depth of the merchant's products on display, the extent to which the merchant's products on display correctly represent the merchant's stock on hand, the availability of information about particular instances of the merchant's products on display, etc. The salesperson, who presence is not an unmitigated blessing, can also affect the shopper's shopping experience. Each of the following salesperson attributes can affect the customer's satisfaction: availability, memory for detail, expertise, truthfulness, etc.
These factors and attributes are each described briefly below: Some merchants' stores have many departments, spread out over multiple floors or over areas as large as one square city block—or both. Without the aide of a greeter and even with the aide of a store directory, a shopper can feel overwhelmed at the prospect of searching such a vast space for the right department or area.
Even having located the right department or area, the shopper may still have to wander an entire floor, several long aisles, many short aisles or a minor maze of display cases.
One way to limit these initial searches is to limit the number of different products in the store. However, shoppers like selection and tend to reward merchants with the greater breadth and/or depth. In response, the merchant increases his displays. Nonetheless, the space available to a merchant is not unlimited, and its choice of products to display must also be limited, regardless of the shoppers' desire for more.
A shopper can be extremely frustrated when he has gone through the bother of locating the right department and sub-department and of selecting the right product from the multiple examples on display, only then to learn that the selected product is not in stock. Accordingly, some importance lies in offering for sale only products which can be sold, that is, which are in stock. At the least, a shopper should be told before he invests time in inspecting a product that that product is not in stock.
A stumbling block on the road to a shopper's walking out with a purchase is providing that shopper with enough information to make him confident enough to buy. Where a shopper is interested in, say, the dot pitch of a laptop screen but the marketing literature on display for the product does not include information about the dot pitch, the shopper's desire to buy that product expectedly wanes.
One way to improve the information available to a shopper is to enlist the aide of a salesperson. People, and in particular, good, well informed salespeople, are very adept at presenting the particular information a shopper wants in order to spur the buying of a product. The first hurdle to fully realizing a sales staff is the “Never a Salesperson Around When You Need One” concept. A shopper can get information from a well informed salesperson only if the salesperson is actually available. Further, a well informed salesperson has a limit to the amount of product detail he can retain and recall on demand. Computer-screen dot pitch, for example, is a feature about which the digerati would ask but about which the typical shopper would not even know.
Indeed, in some cases, a shopper is faced with a salesperson who appears to know less about the product of interest than the shopper does. Let alone knowing product details on the boundary between informative and esoteric, a salesperson can fail to be an expert at all.
Where a shopper's inquiries bottom out on the (lack of) depth of the salesperson's knowledge, the salesperson is faced with conflicting interests. Does he maintain his integrity, admit his lack of knowledge add possibly lose the sale or does he manufacture answers to the shopper's questions, independent of the truth, and persevere to close the sale? The latter option may be successful in the short term, but when the shopper tests his newly purchased product against the salesperson's promises, the merchant can expect a dissatisfied shopper returning the product and demanding a refund.
Salesperson or no, sometimes a product is considered too expensive or fragile for a shopper to experience hands on before purchase.
Accordingly, a new method of presenting a product for sale to a shopper is desirable where:                a shopper does not have to invest time or energy in determining the right department and sub-department or area and sub-area,        the merchant can display an essentially unlimited number of types of products and examples of product types,        a merchant does not present for sale an item which the merchant does not have in stock or, at least, informs a shopper early in the shopping experience that the item is not in stock,        a merchant can present to the shopper all marketing and technical information about the product and/or        marketing and official technical information about any product is always available to the shopper.        
DalmerChrysler Corp. of Detroit, Mich. has manufactured a kiosk for displaying products. FIG. 1 is a sketch of this kiosk 100 according to the prior art. The kiosk 100 includes a touch screen 120, a cathode-ray tube display 110, a speaker system 130 and a printer 140. A housing 150 holds the components of the kiosk 100 together.
The speaker system 130 is stereophonic but with low-quality speakers.
In operation, a user approaches the kiosk 100 and, following directions on its display 110, uses the touch screen 120 to navigate its menu system to locate a product of interest. The kiosk 100 displays a limited-animation or non-animated sequence of pictures of the product—or even a single, static picture of the product. The audio information that the kiosk 100 offers is voice and/or music only.
Accordingly, an improved product presentation system is desirable where:                the visual display of the product is dynamic and/or        the display of the product includes sensory information other than product appearance and human voice.Indeed, in its fullest expression, such a product presentation system would include all sensory aspects of the product such that having the actual product present would be redundant. The product as presented is virtually real.        
These and other goals of the invention will be readily apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art on reading the background above and the description below.